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It’s a wrap! Reflecting on ISTE 2016

The past month has been an absolute whirlwind for the Kami team. Last month, I (Jim), Hengjie (the CEO), and Alliv (the COO) jumped on a plane heading for San Francisco. That’s a total of 60% of our team taking the Kami word overseas, leaving the other 40% in the Auckland office. (Sorry, guys!) The reason for our trip was to attend the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) annual conference in Denver, Colorado, as well as a few stops here and there for photos.

After five days in San Francisco preparing for the conference, it was time to carry six oversized boxes full of swag for our booth to the Midwest and get ready for the upcoming three days. With 16,000 education professionals and 500 companies from across the globe heading to Denver, it was time for us to get our A game on.

When the doors to the conference hall opened, our booth was flooded with a continuous crowd of teachers and education professionals wanting to know about Kami. (The Whittaker’s chocolate helped too.) Over the next three days, we had more than a thousand conversations with different people about Kami, doing our best to understand their pressure points in the classroom and educating the educators on how Kami can help them with so many of these. For us living down under in New Zealand, talking to our users in North America gave us a huge boost – and we feel so lucky to be able to build relations with teachers across America using Kami in their classrooms. We met some of the kindest teachers – even a lovely lady named Kami Cottrell. We also had a few fantastic influencers talk about Kami at their lectures and poster sessions including the lovely Megan Shanley pictured below from Albuquerque Public Schools who gave an amazing lecture on Supporting Diverse Learning Needs Through Tech Integration.

In all of the great conversations that we had with our existing users, and hopefully future users, we found that the same pressure points were continually discussed. Many of these Kami can help with, such as:

The ability to markup and annotate a variety of documents, including the ever-challenging PDF.

Software that is easy to use and uncomplicated for students and teachers alike.

Great support; the ability to talk directly with people who can help.

Software that is affordable and that can work into any school budget.

Software that can work with Google Classroom and Google Drive.

Software that works perfectly on Chromebooks.

Software that assists students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia.

A solution for classrooms going paperless.

We want to thank every person who attended ISTE and took the time to meet us at the Kami booth. Every conversation that we had over the three days has been taken into consideration. For now, we have a large pile of notes in a plethora of formats to go through, people to follow up with, emails to answer, and some serious sleep to catch up on.